San Rafael, CA - CACFP Sponsor

"As a CACFP sponsor of numerous child care centers in Marin County, California we have a vast wealth gap that leaves many families food insecure within certain pockets of the county, which we believe has become worse lately. What we have done as an agency is started a drive-through lunch pick-up, where we distribute 1 meal per day plus any additional food that has been donated to us by one of our community partners (food bank, extra food.org, etc.). We have chosen our site location based on the proximity to where we know many of our families live and where there is not a school district distributing food within a 10-minute drive. We had to create a new system for tallying the number of meals we distribute. Now we check off child by name on an alphabetical list of all enrolled children & then also make a tally by classroom so we know who is coming. We've found that we get better turnout when we send DAILY text messages to all our families reminding them to come & letting them know when we have extra food. We also have not turned away a meal to anyone even if they are not in our program or they are a relative of a child in our program--we have been tracking these on a separate "community meals" list--wondering if we might get reimbursed for this as school districts currently are? Fortunately we have been able to meet the nutrition guidelines for a lunch meal, but a flexibility around standardized recipes would be very helpful. We have been allowing families to collect up to 3 meals at a time so they don't have to come on multiple days. We are utilizing several of the CACFP flexibilities including the ones for meal times, parent pickup, after school activities, non-congregate option, and monitoring--thanks for that. We are also running a pop-up child care center for children of essential workers at a local hospital & are wondering if there will be any way we can count these children in our CACFP reimbursement--they are getting breakfast, lunch, dinner and 2 snacks from us, all following CACFP guidelines. For our pop-up child care we are not doing family style meals, but serving everything pre-portioned, only using disposable plates/utensils (extra expense), taking extra sanitation precautions/additional remote trainings, and tallying meals eaten as usual. We are also providing all of our pop-up child care staff with meals as they have limited options of where to quickly access food elsewhere & may be working long days/we want to limit what they are bringing to the site from their homes--another area we would like for you to consider. Thank you!!!" ~ Leah